ABSTRACT:

The paper takes a look at poverty as a global phenomenon but admits that the intensity and scale varyfrom one society to another. It asserts that there is widespread poverty in Nigeria despite its great endowments. The paper notes that successive regimes in Nigeria have been introducing different programmes to alleviate poverty. It established a link between poverty alleviation programmes (strategies) and governance and blamed the failure of such programmes on absence of good governance. The paper uses secondary data and adopted the elite theory to explain why poverty alleviation programmes fail in Nigeria bearing in mind some of the past programmes. Viable recommendations are made in the paper to ensure the success of future programmes of government